Three Gold Crowns

CHAPTER XVI Meet the Gang

If the Pair-O’-Dice Café was fifty minutes from Times Square, then Smitty, the giant decided, was a monkey’s great-aunt.

It took Smitty, in one of The Avenger’s fastest cars and driving as The Avenger’s aides always drove, fifty-eight minutes to get there. Which meant about an hour and three quarters for the average motorist.

The roadhouse was about sixty miles from town, in a part of New York State curiously wild-looking and sparse of inhabitants when you remembered the metropolis was so comparatively close. There are parts of the State like that — unbelievably back-country, though within driving range of millions of urbanites.

The Pair-O’-Dice was not an impressive-looking place.

It was a three-story structure about as big as a large six-room house, covered with rough slabs on the outside to resemble a log cabin and not doing a very good job of imitating. Woods surrounded it on three sides and picked up again across the smooth highway on which it squatted.

A lot of jalopies around testified that the place was popular for the countrymen around, if not for the city folks. There was a good deal of cheerful noise floating from the barroom, too.

So Smitty and Wilson and Mac didn’t pay any more attention to the bar section. Cheerful noise; innocence. What they were after was a window shaded against light, or whispered secrecy, or stealthy movements.

A powerful sedan was parked in among the jalopies, like a sleek Great Dane among mongrels. Cole looked at the car and then at his two companions, who nodded. It was logical that somebody from New York — from the Gallic Importing Co.’s warehouse, to be exact — had just rolled up in that sleek job.

The three men went around to the back of the place. They looked in a window — the kitchen, with a guy in sloppy whites indifferently frying hamburgers on a big griddle. They looked in another window — storeroom.

There was a shaded window on the second floor. Cole pointed up to it. Smitty knelt down and Cole climbed onto his shoulders. The giant grasped Cole’s ankles in vast hands, and then straightened up. He did it as effortlessly as though there were two pounds of feathers on his back instead of a hundred and eighty-odd pounds of muscle and bone.

Cole could reach the sill from that height. He drew himself up a couple of feet by taut fingertips and looked in. Then he motioned to come down, and Smitty lowered his vast bulk again like a docile elephant.

“It’s all right,” whispered Cole. “Two men in that room, wondering why the four left in the warehouse haven’t reported about the two left to drown in the basement.”

Mac clenched his fists and made low growling noises deep in his throat. Smitty’s gigantic shoulders bulged with cold anger.

“So?” whispered Cole.

“So we meet the gang,” Mac whispered back. “We pay them a little visit. I remember the face of the skurlie who clubbed down the chief. I think he was the leader of the rats. A heavy mon with a paunch and a face like the top of a pail of lard. With luck, he’ll be here.”

There were only two men in that upstairs room, Cole had said. And he told Mac that the man with the lardy face was not one of them. So almost certainly a lot more of the gang must be circulating around down on the main floor.

The three went around to the front, opened the barroom door, and walked in.

There were fifteen or twenty men lined up, with beer, for the main part, in front of them. They were husky men, mostly quite young, with the look of the outdoors that comes to farmhands. They looked indifferently at the door when it was opened, then gaped in awe at Smitty’s enormous bulk.

Mac looked wistfully around for the man who had clubbed the chief but didn’t see him.

“See you at the bar in a minute,” Smitty said to Mac. Then, to the bartender: “Washroom?”

“Right back there, end of the hall,” said the man, jerking a thumb toward the door leading into the central hall of the place. On the other side of this hall was another door, leading into the café. Patrons could come in there, put their feet under tables, and be waited on. Café on one side of the hall; bar on the other.

Out of the corner of his eye, Mac saw Smitty and Wilson pass the other door after a quick stare into the café. The Scot heard the sound of steps down the hall, but he had a hunch that the progress was faked; that Smitty and Wilson were staying right next to that door, out of sight of the folks in the barroom.

“Beer?” said the bartender to Mac.

The Scot reflected sourly. He had to buy something to make it look natural. And beer was the cheapest.

“Yes,” he said reluctantly.

He grudgingly got out a purse with a tight clasp on it, opened the clasp, and drew out a quarter. This he even more grudgingly laid on the bar. There were unlimited funds at the disposal of The Avenger’s men. They could throw it around in thousands, if necessary. But Mac would never get over his hatred of spending a nickel on anything not vitally necessary—

Mac heard a curious little sound from the hall. It was a bit like the squeak of a mouse, and there was a scuffle like that of a frightened mouse; then no more sound.

The whole thing had been so faint that no one in the barroom paid any attention to it — if, indeed, anyone had heard it, save Mac.

The Scot lifted the beer glass to his lips and pretended to drink. Actually, Mac had never touched a drop of anything. There was another sound in the hall.

This time it was not a squeak and a slight scuffle. It was a padded little thud, as if someone, far off, had hit a mattress with a stick. Mac almost grinned, with a bleak, cold light in his baleful eyes.

But that was the end of the odd sounds. A call from the café that drifted in to his ears.

“Mike! Bring some cigarettes back with you.”

Then silence. Then a louder call: “Mike!”

So Mac edged along the bar toward the hall door. The caller in the other room was going to see why Mike hadn’t answered. The fact was in his tone.

Mac reached the barroom entrance onto the hall just as the caller got to the café door. And the two looked at each other — the man with the face graying as if he saw a ghost, and Mac with a frightening small smile on his freckled, homely face.

The man tried to turn and race back into the room, but the Scot got a bony hand on his shoulder from behind and jerked him back. And that was the end of the silence.

Two men lying peacefully on the floor at the feet of the giant Smitty showed the meaning of the small sounds. The giant and Cole had waited flat against the wall next to the café door and silently and cheerfully knocked out the men leaving the room, one by one.

But this had torn it!

With all the power of his shoulders and arm, Mac sent a fist into the putty face of the man who had called for Mike. It was the guy who had hit Benson; and all the loyal Scot’s allegiance to his grim master, The Avenger, was in the blow.

“Wow!” said Smitty, as he ran past. He had never seen even Mac strike such a blow. Nose, mouth, and eyes seemed to be blotted out by the big bony fists and then reappeared again, all scrambled, as the man with the paunch sagged without a move to the floor.

Now guns roared! Smitty and Mac yelled as bullets raised welts under the bulletproof celluglass garments that shielded their bodies; yelled and raced for three tables next to the orchestra dais.

This was the main body of the gang, all right. There were ten men at the three tables. Rather, there had been ten places set. Seven were filled, the other three represented by the men lying like cordwood in the hall and the fellow with the mashed face in the doorway.

Almost all the seven had their guns out. So Smitty threw a table at them.

Simple? Sure. He just threw a table at them. But when it is pointed out that the tables were of the rustic type with young logs for legs and thick slabs for tops, it becomes not quite so simple. Try throwing a hundred and twenty or thirty pounds sometime.

The table only hit two of the group of seven because their chairs were so scattered. But these two stayed hit, and the rest had instinctively ducked when the ponderous object sailed at their heads, ruining their aim.

And then the three attackers were too close to be shot at.

Smitty socked a man who had managed to get to his feet. The man had had his fists up, with a gun in one, in a pretty good guard. But guards didn’t bother the giant any. He had never learned to box, simply because he didn’t need to.

He just hit at a man. If the man had his body or face guarded, the power of the giant’s blow was enough to drive the man’s own fists against him with knockout force. It did so in this case.

Cole landed on another; Mac swung and missed and was clouted glancingly with a gun butt.

Mac came up from the floor with a chair in his hands. Then his hands held only the splintered back of a chair, and bits of leg and seat spread between the prone bodies of two men the chair had reached.

Smitty suddenly bellowed “Ouch!” and whirled like a maddened bull elephant. In the doorway were the two men Cole had seen upstairs, drawn down by the commotion. Behind them, crowded at the barroom door, were the men from the bar.

One of the two had shot the giant in the back, and shield or no shield, it had hurt.

Smitty had happened to be engaged in swinging one man by the ankles like a club at two more men, when the shot got him. So when he turned, he stood, furious, with a leg in his left hand and the body of the man dripping down from the leg. It was like a child standing with a doll in its hand. And the sight, like a movie set of King Kong on a rampage, was a little more than the nerves of the men in the doorway could stand.

One of them yelled quaveringly. The other tried to yell and only gasped like a fish. Then both turned and ran for their lives, with Smitty bellowing after — forgetting till he reached the doorway to drop the leg he held.

There was the scream of a car engine, like that of a horse roweled beyond endurance. And Smitty turned back into the café, growling like a frustrated grizzly bear who had just had a hunter “that big” get away from him.

There was nothing left to do in the café. Mac and Cole were the only two standing. Except Mac wasn’t standing. He was going through the pockets of the paunchy man — who was going to need a new face when he came to.

Three little gold things glinted for an instant in Mac’s hand.

“Okay,” he said, straightening up.

So they went out to their car, with no one in the bar making a move. It wasn’t their fight; they were just customers here. And even if it had been their fight, the sight of Smitty dangling a man carelessly from his hand by the leg was one to linger long.

The three headed back to the city. They were as purry as cats after cream. Not for weeks had they had so satisfying a fight, with bare hands against the hated rats in human form they lived to attack.

“Nice,” said Mac with a sigh as the lights of New York glowed ahead. “We’ve got the three gold crowns back; the chief can release Farquar from the blackmailin’, and the case is closed.”

But The Avenger didn’t act as if the case were closed when they had returned to Bleek Street and turned in the crowns. He took a few thoughtful steps up and down the vast top-floor room, pale eyes burning like ice with light behind it.

And then the three remembered that there was more than blackmail to clear up, now. There were some fancy and assorted murders, too.

Salloway and Cleeves dead.

It looked as if one man held the solution to everything. Beall.

It looked as if Beall had killed the two, to get all the blackmail money; had sent Smathers to his death; had locked the two girls in the office vault to die; had done all the dirty work, with the aid of a hired gang.

But one queer thing couldn’t be explained by that.

If Beall was the power behind this, why had his son been kidnaped? Where did that fit in?

The Avenger dialed a number. It was Farquar’s number. Farquar still hadn’t come home; no one knew where he was. And there was that blood on his office floor!

It looked as if the lawyer, victim of blackmail, had been caught up with at last and was either dead or in peril.